Hyperdemocracy

S. Welch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137099174
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that a well-educated citizenry and freer flow of information has contributed to a state of "hyperdemocracy" which impedes itself. This book applies the idea of 'reflexive modernization' to democratic theory, setting out a new perspective on the challenges democracy faces.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Hyperdemocracy, the Cognitive Dimension of Democracy, and Democratic Theory

“Hyperdemocracy” is a term already in use by students of politics. It was used, for example, by José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses to describe a condition in which “the mass [of people] acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure.”¹ More recently, “hyper-democracy” has been seen, by communications scholar Brian McNair, as a form of political unpredictability that is an outcome of “cultural chaos” in the media, typified by “ideological competition rather than hegemony [and] increased volatility of news agendas.”² Neither writer makes the concept central to his analysis or defines it very clearly, and each places it within an ideological framework, respectively conservative and liberal.

The present book will differ from these predecessors in both respects. While I cannot be sure that my understanding of hyperdemocracy differs from every one of the ten-thousand-plus other uses of the term that a Google search returns, there appears to be room for a book-length treatment of this topic, as distinct from the brief and tangential mentions offered by Ortega and McNair. The arguments of Ortega and McNair are by no means irrelevant to mine, but I propose to situate mine, as they did not theirs, within the theory of democracy. I will also seek to extract the proposal of hyperdemocracy from the normative frameworks in which these earlier mentions appear. I will argue that the condition of hyperdemocracy is not fully captured by conservative or liberal, or indeed radical, ideological approaches.

In this introductory chapter, I will undertake three tasks. The first is of course to give my own interpretation and definition of hyperdemocracy, in section 1.1. In section 1.2, I will explain my focus on a particular subset of the implications of hyperdemocracy for democracy, namely those concerning what I will call the “cognitive dimension of democracy.” Given the centrality of the cognitive dimension of democracy in democratic theory, this is no drastic narrowing of the field. It is, however, a way of giving focus to the analysis to follow, and of illustrating while not yet exhausting the analytical potential of the hyperdemocracy concept. In section 1.3, I will examine the nature of democratic theory itself, seeking in the process to break down putative subdisciplinary barriers, especially between “normative” and “empirical” approaches, that have sometimes impeded progress and led to somewhat artificial debates.

Since I conceive of the book as a whole as an exploratory introduction to the idea and the study of hyperdemocracy, this introductory chapter will not do more than set the scene for the later development of the argument. I will outline the structure of the remaining chapters in the final section; a structure that makes use of the framework of democratic theory that I develop in section 1.3.

1.1 The Idea of Hyperdemocracy

The prefix “hyper-” denotes both great magnitude, something beyond “super-,” and also excess—a medical meaning that has entered popular usage probably thanks to the identification of “hyperactivity” as a disorder, giving us the adjective “hyper.” I certainly want to exploit these meanings and connotations by proposing the term “hyperdemocracy”—otherwise I would have chosen a different word—but neither “more democracy” nor “an excess of democracy” entirely capture the meaning intended.

In order to capture it, we can ask what “more democracy” might mean. It might refer, in the first place, to the extension of democracy. But what does this mean? At its simplest, the extension of democracy refers to the adoption of democratic government by countries that previously lacked it, as in the democratic transitions at the end of the Cold War. But it might also mean not the spatial but the topical extension of democracy, as when topics such as human reproduction or women’s rights become matters for democratic debate and mobilization. More radically, democratization might be extended functionally beyond the polity and, for instance, into the workplace or the school. In these latter senses, topical and functional, we might instead speak not of the extension but of the intensification of democracy. But this last term is best applied to a particular kind of democratization, where the procedures and contexts of democracy are themselves subject to democratization. For example, the democratization of a political party that itself competes democratically for votes would represent the intensification of democracy. So would the democratization of a court whose function is to decide on the constitutional admissibility of legislation, or the democratization of the procedure for selecting committee chairs within a legislature.

It is in respect of the intensification of democracy in this sense that, I suggest, the condition of hyperdemocracy arises. Hypothetically, it is the condition in which aspects of the constitutive preconditions of democracy are themselves democratized, with adverse consequences for democracy’s continued operation. It is a condition of the reflexive undermining of democracy by processes it itself unleashes.

I say “hypothetically” because I have yet to establish, first, that such constitutive preconditions exist, and second, that it is possible for democracy to undermine them. To demonstrate the first, an example of a constitutive precondition of democracy is the prior specification of the members of the citizenry. By definition, a citizenry cannot vote on who is to constitute it. Of course, a citizenry could vote to admit new members, as when the suffrage has been extended in initially property-owning or male democracies, and a putative citizenry could agree by vote to be admitted to a larger one, as in the plebiscites (organized by the victorious powers) that took place in some regions of the new countries of Eastern Europe as part of the settlement that followed the First World War. But these examples do not contradict my initial claim. Historically, peoples have come into existence by means that have nothing to do with formal democracy, and once that has happened, to at least a minimal degree (minimal because, to cite an example from a well-known study, some “peasants” may not at first have known that they were “Frenchmen” despite the supposed existence of the French people),³ the preconditions exist for the extension of the franchise to them by those of their members who already have it.

The process of constitution making yields numerous instances of the pre- or extrademocratic character of (in this case, literally) “constitutive” conditions of democracy. For we know constitution making only as a highly exclusive activity, whose results may (and even this does not always happen) be presented for popular ratification, according to procedures themselves established in advance by persons other than those who vote on the ratification. These bare facts remain true even if it is accepted that such processes may be accompanied by intense public scrutiny and popular debate, as Bruce Ackerman has claimed to be the case for certain “constitutional moments” in American history, including the Constitution-making period of 1787–1788 itself.⁴ For there is no denying the large difference between the “participation” of the people at large and that of the 55 Constitution makers who met in Philadelphia in May 1787.⁵ This example is redundantly illustrative, however, since as a purely logical matter, as in the case of membership of the citizenry, certain conditions have to be established prior to the democratic process, among them what the procedural detail of that process will be.

In this book, I do not propose to investigate all of the imaginable ways in which the hyperdemocratic undermining of the constitutive preconditions of democracy could take place, though this larger set of questions is certainly worth investigating. Instead, I will focus on a segment of the constitutive preconditions, the segment having to do with the cognitive conditions for democracy and “democratic will formation,” the making of democratic decisions. But while this is a narrowing of focus, it is not a drastic one; indeed as the next section will argue, and the book as a whole will substantiate, the “cognitive dimension of democracy” is a fundamental interest of democratic theory. It is in this dimension, then, that I will investigate the potential for hyperdemocratic undermining of constitutive preconditions. Hyperdemocracy in the context of the cognitive dimension of democracy means the self-undermining, by processes inherent in democracy itself, of the cognitive preconditions necessary for democratic will formation and democratic decision.

1.2 The Cognitive Dimension of Democracy

To focus attention on the cognitive dimension of democracy in a discussion of the trajectory of democracy is, to repeat, not to move to the margins, but rather to the heart, of democratic thought and practice. Democracy is a form of rule, and as such it is necessarily also a form of decision making. And even if it is not only a form of decision making, its other functions—such as inducting the population into a sense of belonging in the citizenry, or improving its members’ sense of personal efficacy—clearly also have an important cognitive aspect. Decision making, in turn, rests on establishing the conditions which will enable, first, the closure of a decision, that is, convergence on a singular outcome, and second, that the decision will be a good one. These two requirements, whatever the political system (including pure autocracy, if such a thing could exist), are cognitive requirements, for they relate to the ratiocinative process that culminates in a decision, and to knowledge of the criteria by which its goodness shall be judged.

As I will show in chapter 2, much of the history of thought about democracy has been antidemocratic precisely because of doubt as to the feasibility of these requirements under democratic rule. The reasoning power of the people and the adequacy of their “values” have been recurrently questioned. Democracy is a system of rule in which everyone (with some exceptions, notably the very young) may and should participate in decision making, and this includes people of very different and sometimes low reasoning capacity. Hence, either the avoidance or the severe limitation of democracy has been advocated. Conversely, prodemocratic thought has centered its arguments on a more positive reading of popular cognitive capacity, an influential argument being that of J. S. Mill, who supposed that democracy itself would progressively increase the cognitive preconditions for its own successful operation.

Plainly, the democratic-skeptical idea that the majority of the people are insufficiently educated or rational has to be evaluated as an empirical claim, and as such is likely to gain plausibility under conditions of extreme social inequality, in which the reasoning power of, for instance, peasants or slaves will seem self-evidently to be low, and perhaps irredeemably so. But conditions such as these can change, creating the possibility of more optimistic assessments. Thus arises the progressive idea that all people may usefully and rightly participate in decision making, with the utility and rightness increasing as cognitive capacity increases, that is, with education and the greater availability of information.

However, there is a constitutive aspect to the democratic-skeptical position as well as a dynamic and causal one (a distinction I will expound in section 1.3). The former is more plausible than the latter. It rests on the requirements of decision making itself, considered abstractly. To be possible, decisions need to be cognitively bounded.⁶ The deciding process must have a determinate scope and shape, and the criteria must be established in advance of the decision. Now this will at once appear to be a defense of the agenda-setting and value-setting power of elites and authorities that democratization has always sought to limit, and which critical democratic thought continues to find objectionable even at the present stage of democracy’s trajectory. Even so, it is as much a logical precondition of decision making as is the prior determination of the identity of the deciders that I discussed in the previous section. Without an agenda—by which I mean not only a finite set of options but also a set procedure for addressing and ordering them—and a set of criteria or values by which the options may be ranked, the decision cannot reach closure.

Now it does not follow that one has to settle for the agenda or the values put forward by the extant holders of power. Of course, these constraints are always motivated, among other possibly more benign considerations, by the desire of the power holders to retain their prerogatives, and democratic thought has rightly questioned such arguments. But, on pain of an infinite regress, some factors must remain outside and prior to any decision-making process. To decide, one must have both agenda and criteria. These too may be subject to decision, but that decision requires its own agenda and criteria.

My argument here is similar to, but nevertheless differs from, that of “public choice theory,” a branch of economic and rational choice argument that has focused on the problems that can arise, mathematically speaking, when people of identical reasoning capacity but different preferences have to combine their preferences in a vote. Circumstances can arise, it is argued, in which the vote has no determinate outcome, thanks to cycling among alternatives by successive opposing majorities. The implication for democratic theory is that an authoritative, that is, extrademocratic, intervention is necessary in order to prevent this cycling problem.⁷

This public choice argument is, like mine up to this point, an abstract one. But it is more abstract than mine because it proceeds, thanks to its rational choice origin, on the basis of axiomatic assumptions about voters’ cognitive capacity and thus does not have anything to say about changes in that capacity over time. In this respect, it does not address the cognitive dimension of democracy. It is indeed a timeless and abstract theory, and many critics have questioned how often its predictions about cycling have actually come to pass.

For a theoretical basis, I would look instead to the philosophical investigation made by Ludwig Wittgenstein of what it is to follow a rule.⁸ He asked how we know that we are following a rule in cases other than the examples we were shown when we were being taught the rule. The answer seems to be, we simply know the rule. But the rule itself doesn’t tell us. It says, “Do X under circumstance Y.” But it does not tell us how to recognize circumstance Y. For that, we seem to need another rule. Yet for that rule ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Hyperdemocracy, the Cognitive Dimension of Democracy, and Democratic Theory
• Chapter 2 The Cognitive Dimension of Democracy from Plato to Mill
• Chapter 3 Constitutive Theory: Competition, Polyarchy, and the Cognitive Dimension of Democracy
• Chapter 4 Causal Theory: Progressivist and Skeptical Strands of Modernization Theory
• Chapter 5 Cognitive Mobilization and Reflexive Modernization: Deriving the Theory of Hyperdemocracy
• Chapter 6 The Decline of Democracy: Social Capital and Post-Democracy versus Hyperdemocracy
• Chapter 7 The Revival of Democracy: Deliberative Democracy and Postmodern Democracy versus Hyperdemocracy
• Chapter 8 Symptoms of Hyperdemocracy (I): Science and Expertise
• Chapter 9 Symptoms of Hyperdemocracy (II): The Media
• Chapter 10 Conclusion: The Place and the Trajectory of Hyperdemocracy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index